


A Multitude of Drops

by aseriousbunburyist



Category: Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-23
Updated: 2012-11-23
Packaged: 2017-11-19 07:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/570961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aseriousbunburyist/pseuds/aseriousbunburyist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We're all just stories, in the end."</p><p>"I'd rather be music."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Multitude of Drops

**Author's Note:**

> Entirely a result of seeing [these](http://aseriousbunburyist.tumblr.com/post/36336172141/saw-the-matt-smith-gif-and-all-i-could-think-was#notes) gifs in close succession. An end note of the departure of the Ponds... and Frobisher. Frobisher's suicide note interspersed with the stories of two broken men.

_Sixsmith,_

_Shot myself through the roof of my mouth at five A.M. this morning with V.A.’s Luger. But I saw you, my dear, dear fellow! How touched I am that you care so much! On the belfry’s lookout, yesterday, at sunset. Sheerest fluke you didn’t see me first._

The Doctor traces his fingers over the grain of the paper, as if a touch could drain away this acceptance, this flippant, sadly determined tone and replace it with a hope he doesn’t have any right to give. Forty years. It’s been forty years since Rufus Sixsmith read this letter for the first time of many, and wandered forward in search of the rest of his life. Sixsmith shows the years. The Doctor feels them. They’re in Buenas Yerbas now, back in Sixsmith’s apartment, back in the same room where they met for the first time. The letters sit on the bed, a single chronicle among stories, lives, tales that can’t be untold.

_...Wasn’t the sheerest fluke I saw you first, not really. World’s a shadow theater, an opera, and such things writ large in its libretto. Don’t be too cross at my role. You couldn’t understand, no matter how much I explained. You’re a brilliant physicist, your Rutherford chap et al. agree you’ve got a brilliant future, quite sure they’re right. But in some fundamentals you’re a dunce. The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken. You’d try to list all the reasons for living, but I left ’em behind at Victoria Station back in early summer._

The Doctor met Sixsmith after he mistakenly landed in an apartment building in the 1970’s. He had stepped out of the TARDIS, out of the smoke, slightly befuddled but mostly empty, to find a man regarding him. Turns out you can hold an entire conversation through eye contact.

“You remind me of someone,” Sixsmith had said, and such a normal statement was almost an absurdity, there was a police box in his bedroom after all, but more so because it was followed by, “Would you like some tea?”

Easy. Simple. He didn’t know about the letters, the story of this man’s past. The Doctor nodded. They set out to see the stars that night.

_Luger here. Thirteen minutes to go. Feel trepidation, naturally, but my love of this coda is stronger. An electrical thrill that, like Adrian, I know I am to die. Pride, that I shall see it through. Certainties._

It doesn’t take long for Sixsmith to understand the finer points of time travel. Brilliant, this one. Physicist. Can change the world.  

“So, time can be rewritten?” he asks quiet day, not quite hopeful. The Doctor doesn’t tell him that sometimes it can be, but never when it matters most. Never when it well and truly matters. Doesn’t tell him, _Traveling can only take you so far before you realize it can’t take you to the one place you need to be._ He’s seen the letters by this point, Sixsmith always has them near his person. The Doctor thinks of Frobisher and his view of humans, of obscenity, _How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner._ The Doctor tries to remember when his wolves appeared. He can’t. They’ve been with him too long.

_Reason I crept back down from the belvedere was that I can’t have you blaming yourself for failing to dissuade me. You may anyway, but don’t, Sixsmith, don’t be such an ass. Around we go._

Once, when Sixsmith was resting, The Doctor went to Bruges on a whim. (But it’s never that, is it?) As it happened, The Doctor may have met Robert Frobisher chronologically first, but who pays attention to that sort of thing anymore? He finds him on the balustrade, and distractedly wonders if this is the composer’s last, if he’s timed it that tragically by mistake.

“Here for the view?” The Doctor asks.

“Something like that,” Frobisher says. It’s his last, after all.

“Here every day? Around and around we go?” he asks lightly.

“...Quite.”

The Doctor watches him watch the world. He doesn’t know why he’s come. _We’re all stories in the end,_ The Doctor thinks. He feels it acutely, particularly now. He says it aloud.

“Stories?” Frobisher repeats, eyes focused on the other side of the belfry. He takes a drag of his cigarette, his last cigarette. “I’d rather be music.”

The Doctor wants to say, _That sort of glory will tear you apart_ , but it already has. The Doctor doesn’t tell him, _There’s so much more to the world than the average eye can see, wonders you could never have dreamed of._ Instead he says, “There’s something to that,” and lets it go. He checks his watch. It stopped ages ago. He can’t remember when.

He retreats out of the way, but stays, until a man in a beat up trilby reaches the top, out of breath, and Frobisher smiles at the world, lights up for a minute, a warm nostalgia filling him up while none of it touches the certainty of his heart. The Doctor stays and watches a young Sixsmith arrive a second too late to catch Frobisher trail away, watches the same mistake play out, watches Sixsmith’s composer slip through the cracks of the world. He stays. Stays and watches a young Sixsmith rush off. After all, he knows what happens. Stays as a penance, and abstractly wishes he hadn’t read that letter, selfishly wishes this wasn’t a certainty. He knows it hurts worse because he understands why it had to happen, and he can't help but agree with the decision.

_Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour._

_Sunt lacrimæ rerum._

_R.F._

Such a cycle. The Doctor places the last letter back with the others. There is no running to a better tomorrow. Sixsmith accepts this more readily than the Doctor. The Doctor almost laughs. Humans never cease to amaze him. Maybe that’s why this life is so hard, because he keeps letting them.

He says goodbye to Sixsmith now, not long after they’d come to the decision that it was time for him to go home. They didn’t travel together for very long. (Rufus is too important, too accustomed to facing his life head on to be away for long.) The TARDIS is outside. The Doctor walks down the hallway, looks back once. When he turns forward again, it’s directly into a young woman.

“Sorry, sorry!” he says and steadies her.

“No, it’s fine, really, thank you... I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Oh, well, I don’t live here, just taking the new legs for a spin, and all that. John Smith,” he says after a pause.

“Luisa Rey,” she responds, taking his hand, before he apologizes again and waves at her retreating back. Something compels him to watch, just for a moment more. Sixsmith’s door opens, going out for whatever reason, and Luisa pauses, looking at this man, forty years her senior. Sixsmith stares back. They look at each other for a long time.

The Doctor looks away first. The universe is big, it’s vast and complicated, and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles. He’s glad to see some stories deserve happy endings. (Just not his.)

_P. S.-- Don’t let them say I died for love, Sixsmith, that would be too ridiculous. We both know in our hearts who is the sole love of my short, bright life. I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework._

“Need a lift?”

The man in the beat up trilby looks up, quietly surprised, drawn out of a reverie that runs too deep, too fresh. He glances behind him, a little abortive gesture that says less about realizing he’s lost, and more about why he’s drifting in the first place.

“I think I do.” This is a very different man than the Sixsmith of forty years future. This man needs to run. “Very much so,” and it’s calm, his voice, calmer than it has any right to be, but maybe that’s just the quick work of a newly hollowed heart.

The Doctor wouldn’t know. His pain isn’t the calm sort. It demands to be recognized in other ways. It isn’t elegant. It isn’t certain enough for a Luger. (If he’s honest, he recognizes the coward at work. But he’d take that any day.) And misery always was a perverse sort of company. Once he would have faced this pain that hasn’t dulled a day alone.

But he has a letter of his own. So he opens the door of the TARDIS wider.


End file.
